The Shadow of a Gunman
The Times, 2nd April 1980, Irving Wardle
Chris Dyer’s set for this O’Casey centenary production replaces the upstage windows
of the tenement room with a back wall over which something has been violently splashed.
Blood, you think at first, and then recognise the marks for what they are: huge ink
blots.
‘The Shadow of a Gunman’ has been much celebrated as a public play. First performed
during the war of independence, it saved the Abbey Theatre from bankruptcy and earned
its author £4. With this piece, articulating the farcical horrors of the time O’Casey
achieved a mesmeric hold over the Dublin audience who subsequently never forgave
him for turning his back on them.
Without denying the play’s public aspect, Michael Bogdanov’s production also asks
you to remember its devious and unheroic creator who had quit the Irish Citizens
Army when things started turning nasty. He was already 43 when ‘The Gunman’ appeared,
but it is still a young man’s play, fired by a mixture of arrogance and self-loathing
of a man to whom the act of writing is at once a life’s mission and a cowardly evasion
of reality.
This matters because it had led to a misjudgement of the play. ’The Gunman’ consists
essentially of a duologue between the two occupants of the room: the peddler Seumas
and the poet Donal whom the rest of the house mistake for an IRA man on the run.
Past audiences have laughed at Seumas and the other tenement dwellers, and admired
the superbly controlled collisions of stark horror and irreclaimable Dublin absurdity.
But the sight of Donal quoting Shelley and patronizing the rest of the company has
been seen as a gaping flaw in the middle of the play.
It does no seem so this time. Michael Pennington’s Donal avoids any trace of ingratiation.
He spits out his contempt for the people, treats his visitors with a condescension
that makes you squirm, and succumbs to Dearbhla Molloy’s Minnie, the girl who finally
dies for him, with a patronizing lust worthy of O’Casey’s own confessions in that
department.
As a result, he and Norman Rodway’s marvellous Seumas come over as two sides of the
same act: idealistic heroics in dialogue with pugnacious cowardice. And when the
queue of IRA fans start besieging the door, bestowing the flattering attentions he
never received as a poet, Mr Pennington shows Donal growing to his rightful place
in the Irish stage tradition: a playboy who never begins playing.
In comparison Seumas is a gift of a part, and Mr Rodway with urgently popping eyes,
sublime lack of self-awareness, and wonderful control of the verbal repetitions even
when spraying crumbs out of his mouth, extracts all the juice from it. Among the
visitors I particularly admired Paul Webster’s boozily self-righteous Orangeman,
toasting the Boyne with umbrella swings that almost decapitate his wife; and Kilian
McKenna as the star-struck Tommy trembling from head to foot in moot timidity before
raising the roof with a Republican chorus.
Mr Bogdanov’s production is rightly a celebration of dramatic character: it also
underscores the play’s unforgiving irony in those repeated rhymes where smugness
and false heroics possess the stage in the moment the next outburst of gunfire sends
everyone scurrying for cover.
The Stage and Television Today, 6th August 1981, R.B. Marriott
Sean O’Casey’s first produced play, ‘The Shadow of a Gunman’, dating from 1923, has
been staged with truly grim realism and an essential tragic sense by Michael Bogdanov
at The Warehouse, after a season at The Other Place, Stratford-upon-Avon.
Set in a shabby rooming house in the Dublin slums, the leading figure is the brooding
young poet, Donal Davoren, lofty-minded yet diffident. Around him are the denizens
of the place, poor and loving, silly and gabbling, elevated in ideas and crushed
by poverty, fear and inaction. The males would be men of action, while the women
are for quiet and home. The gun is ruling outside in the streets as the war for Irish
freedom is pursued; and soon soldiers will be inside the tenement.
It is the tragic irony of the work that Donal, completely gunless, should be suspected
of being a gunman on the run, and that he should see nothing wrong or dangerous in
looking upon himself as, he says, the shadow of a gunman. It is a little exciting,
the poet feels.
O’Casey’s satire mingles with his realistic picture of everyday life and conversation.
It seems something like a miracle when he tells us all about these ordinary folk
as he looks beyond, into the bloody city, and further still, into any world where
human life is wantonly destroyed.
Seldom can there have been an early work of any writer to carry such a deeply forged
stamp of genius.
Michael Pennington is chillingly moving as the imaginative, self-enclosed Davoren,
and Norman Rodway perfectly conveys the simple terrors and would-be worldliness of
Seumas Shields, the tinker. Together, these fine artists create a stark world of
horror as they hold back while sweet Minnie, Donal’s love, is shot by the Black and
Tans. Dearbhla Molloy gives a most tender and touching portrayal of this sad, lost
young woman.
There are also excellent performances by Timothy Walker, Oliver Ford Davies, Barbara
Kinghorn and Dennis Clinton, and designs that seem to belong exactly to the lower
depths of Dublin in those monumentally troubled times.
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